[Kmymoney-devel] Version 3.97 - Announcement draft

[Alvaro Soliverez]

Hello all, here is the draft for the announcement of the 3.97 release.
Please review and point to any errors, ommisions, areas which need
improvement, etc.

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KMyMoney releases third beta for KDE4 and maintenance version for KDE3
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The KMyMoney Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of
version 3.97 of KMyMoney. This is the third beta release for the KDE4
platform, and probably our last beta before the first candidate
release.
As with previous releases, this version is still considered beta and
not recommended for general use. We continue to get feedback from the
community and find those issues that are not immediately apparent
during development.

This release has seen a lot of work in two different areas. The first,
and probably most important to users, is fixing bugs. The second is to
continue porting pieces of the code away from Qt3Support to a full
KDE4 native mode.

Over 30 bugs have been fixed, new and old, during this release, from
trivial one-liner quirks to more complicated ones, like porting whole
widgets due to small incompatibilities with KDE SC 4.4. As for the
previous release, only 8 bugs remain open at this point. We do have a
lot more wishlist items, which we hope to attend to on its due time.

The account and category selectors, among others, have been ported to
a KDE4-native mode. From a user's perspective, there will be no
apparent change other than some style improvements, and that's how it
should be. From a development point of view, however, it is important,
because eventually all similar widgets will follow the same path.
Several other minor lists and widgets have been ported. So far, it has
been a learning experience, which the team is leveraging to plan
future steps of the port. An outstanding aspect of the port is that we
usually end up with less lines of code than we previously had, and
with more readable and maintainable code, which is a good trend and it
shows the advantages of using the new frameworks offered by the KDE4
platform.

There continues to be constant feedback and joint work with the
packagers in different distributions, which shows in better and more
stable packages in the main distributions. Also, we are improving our
communication with them to help in bug fixing and triaging, which
eases their work and helps us get more feedback, which in turn results
in more bugs fixed and a better packaging and easier installation
methods for users.

For those still using the KDE3 platform version, the team has also
released version 1.0.4. This maintenance release contains some fixes
and improvements we found during the development of the KDE4 version
and backported to it.